Category Archives: Formula

Conditional Formatting with formula could be tricky (or difficult), especially when the data layout is bad because you have to very clear and careful on the “applied to” range and the absolute/relative references set in the formula. Otherwise, it won’t work and can be quite confusing, if not frustrating. 😛

In this post, I will talk about a case that you will see how empty rows in a data set would complicate the process in setting up conditional formatting. And then I will show three different approaches to tackle the issues. Hope you find it helpful. Continue reading →

Rate this:

Today is a public holiday in Hong Kong. A perfect break in the middle of a busy week. What did I do on a public holiday? Excel, Excel and Excel. 🙂 I watched a few videos from my favourite YouTube … Continue reading →

Rate this:

This is a short story of mine, and an imaginary conversation in my head… How to change the first letter (of first word only) to upper case in Excel? This was a question from a colleague sitting opposite to me. … Continue reading →

Rate this:

When TRIM and CLEAN do not work… Is it something bothering you? To fix this problem, we need to understand where is the “leading space” coming come. Before we jump to that, I want to show you two Excel functions … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Have you received workbook from others that carries underscore _ as if a space in their worksheet names? Did you wonder why people use underscore when we can actually use space in worksheet name? Well… did you know… long long time ago, #Excel … Continue reading →

Rate this:

I seldom use the HYPERLINK function in #Excel. Normally I insert hyperlink by CTRL+K, then setting the reference I want the link to go to. That is super easy (or quick and dirty)! Note: You may go to Insert tab on ribbon … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Lookup an image using “Linked Picture” in #Excel Perhaps you have used VLOOKUP to return a value from a table very often. However you cannot use VLOOKUP to return an image… So how the above can be done? You will … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Quite a long time ago, I wrote a post to discuss a trick to format date with “st”, “nd”, “rd”, etc… In this post, I am going to discuss the reversed way: Turning an English written date with “Dst MMMM, … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Got the following question: hi, how do i search for a specific combination of characters exclusively i.e. if one cell contains 5A;3B&4C while another cell contains 5AA;3B&4C, and my search criteria is 5A, i want the results to return only … Continue reading →

Rate this:

What is “Whichever higher”? Situation: You call to your favourite restaurant to reserve a private room for family dinner on Saturday. The restaurant manager tells you that there will be a minimum charge of $2000 for a private room. That mean, … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Advanced use of SUMPRODUCT for multi-conditional SUM In the previous posts, we talked about the basic of SUMPRODUCT, the behaviors of logical values (i.e. TRUE/FALSE) when they are put into basic mathematics operations. These set the foundation to understand the … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Have you heard about Logic Gate? I learned logic gate in high school physics. Decades ago… so don’t expect I can remember what it is. 😛 Having said that, I do remember the fundamental concept about AND gate and OR gate, … Continue reading →

Rate this:

The basic of SUMPRODUCT Suppose we have a column showing retail price of different items; another column showing the units sold (illustrated above). To get the total sales, most people will deploy a helper column to get the sales of each … Continue reading →

Rate this:

This post is trying to answer a question by Laura in the post of 2D SUMIF with two variables – one on column and one on row. Here’s part of the question: ……I want to look up the department in the vertical … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Answer to the 5 little Tricks posted in the beginning of the year – Part 1/5 Transpose Data – Result is static This is actually a simple trick of using Copy and Paster (Special, Transpose). See? It can be done in a … Continue reading →

Rate this:

SUMIF is a handy but helpful function. The syntax is simple: =SUMIF(range,criteria,[sum range] What it does is quite straight forward indeed. In the example above, it instructs Excel to look into the range (A2:A7), look for the matching criteria, which … Continue reading →

Rate this:

Writing a long formula is not easy, even for an advanced Excel user. What I mean long is a formula with many nested FUNCTIONS within a single formula. The difficulty I am talking about is not related to whether you understand the … Continue reading →

Rate this:

We talked about RIGHT, LEFT, MID, UPPER, LOWER, PROPER, FIND, SEARCH, REPLACE and SUBSTITUTE in the past few weeks. Now it’s time to put every thing together to solve a problem. This is actually the most amazing part of using … Continue reading →

Rate this:

We talked about REPLACE and SUBSTITUTE last week. At the final note, I said that SUBSTITUTE is case-sensitive. If we need to perform a case-insensitive SUBSTITUTE, it is indeed not an easy job unless we are talking a single letter … Continue reading →